Wednesday, April 04, 2012

This still counts as ‘working,’ right?

I have a ton of items on my “things it would be really awesome to deal with while I am between contracts and the Denizens are in school / we still have Vanessa the Great handling most of the Crazy” list. Naturally, I have therefore spent the last four days…um…well…I did bake bread yesterday. And cleaned the kitchen. Most of it. Except the parts I skipped.

And I spent almost the entire weekend watching Netflix and working on this.

Just in time for warm weather! Woo hoo!

I finished almost all of this in a single marathon burst on Sunday…which was not how I’d planned to spend the day, BUT…see, I had decided that I would do a little gardening first thing in the morning, while the nasal spray from the night before was still working and I felt more or less almost in the same ballpark as OK.

I had this passionate need to do this because…well…my empire has been under siege while I was away.

…yeah…those are ALL weeds…

These suckers exploded into being over about three weeks, fueled by rather copious rainfall and relatively warm weather. We literally couldn’t open the side gate, they were so big and strong.

Three weeks ago, that area was bare earth.

Amazing. Some of these were so big, I had to get a shovel to expose their tree-trunk-like roots, and the tree-trimming shears to clip them out.

I got most of the path you can’t see under all that cleared…and then I was leaning on my shovel wheezing and gasping and kind of fuzzy-headed and thinking, OK…I don’t think this is my best plan ever…I’d better give this up, go inside and siddown for a while here, before I fall over…

The husband came outside about that time with his silly gardening hat on, took one look at me and said, “OH no. Put that down and go in the house, right now. You shouldn’t be out here. Go sit down and knit for a while, you’re too sick to be doing this kind of work today.”

So naturally, I then said, “That is a very good idea, dear, I shall take your wise counsel, go inside forthwith and sit with a nice cup of herbal tea to knit while my body does battle with the disease that plagues it, forsooth. Do you know what day it is, do you? IT’S FRICKIN’ APRIL, and I don’t have onions in the ground yet and the whole place is one huge weed patch and furthermore I need to get those starts hardening off plus I have to drag all those mulch-chips off the squash area and GOSH ONLY KNOWS what’s wrong with that bed and I have never seen so many weeds in my whole life and furthermore there’s something wrong with the water over there and holy crap, Easter is next weekend do you hear me, there is way too much to do, AAAAAAAAAAH, I CAN’T SIT DOWN, THE WORLD WILL END!!!!!”

{face-palm}

Sometimes, I really wonder why that man puts up with me. So he just stood there and waited while I grumbled and ranted my way back to not saying anything, then said, “Yeah, no. Gimmie the shovel. And don’t make me hit you with it. House. Now. Sitting. Now.”

And I would have argued with him, but I wasn’t sure he was kidding about the shovel thing. So I went inside and sat down and ugh…you know how sometimes you know you don’t feel particularly good, but you’re moving so you kind of…keep moving? But then you sit down and it’s like, oh, wow, I’m…dying, over here…?

I spent about the next twelve hours sprawled in my chair in front of Netflix knitting, occasionally getting up thinking I was at least recovered enough to…ugh, no, no I’m not…{flop!}…

But boy, did I make progress on the sweater! Which totally counts as working, right?!

I had the bottom third of the body and one sleeve done and the other sleeve about five inches from done when I started…finished the sleeve, got everything back on one needle, around and around and around, straight up through the color chart and decreases and three inches of collar in a single weekend.

I still have a couple ends to run in (details!), but otherwise – it’s finally done: The “quick” pullover that I started back in November.

I have quite a few projects like that lying around here…things that got too big for the train, or where something had been not-quite-right with it, that I meant to figure out in good daylight here at home but never did.

All the other stuff is arguably more important…like finally getting all those IEP goodies scanned onto disk, and taming the paper-monster that has begun erupting out of my filing cabinet, sorting through all the ancient manuals for equipment we haven’t owned in eight years, filing the various tax forms, and figuring out where The Randomizer™ has put everything while I was away. (Not Me and Ida Know have been real busy around here lately…I’ve got more missing kitchen tools than you’d believe, a few of them a bit on the scary side, like the missing mandolin insert that will slice the tip of your finger clean off if you grope blindly into a drawer and it is lurking around in there.)

But there’s still something deeply satisfying about being able to put away the leftover yarn, fold up the project bag that I’ve been tripping over for months now, and mutter, “Done!” to myself.